Maybe Hold A Telethon
link AFP: US senator calls for aid to Arab democracy.
And speaking of fantasy world, John Kerry is making the case now to send U.S. financial aid to help the strife ridden Arab economies in order to build democracy. !!! There are few representatives more removed from reality save perhaps the other 52 Democratic senators and 193 members of Congress. Kerry is the guy who, like his buddies, exhorts the little guy to pay more taxes but who parks his yacht in another state to avoid… taxes. If he was a contestant on Jeopardy, his answer to the query, ‘taxes’ , would be ‘what other people pay’.
Unfortunately, all the time spent on the yacht precluded him from being able to keep up with the news affecting the U.S. economy, the main story being that the government, aka the people, are out of money. I’m not sure how he reads the polls, but my guess is that if you asked the average Joe to shovel more money to the middle east to support nationhood, it may get a some push-back. Heck, when you balance paying the mortgage against paying taxes to support the middle east, the decision could be tough.
Recently, another guy, by the name of Bush, spent a few billion with the hope of building nations and spreading democracy in that part of the world too. That didn’t go very well as he was roundly excoriated for his ‘imperialist’ and meddling efforts. Ironically, Iraq is now the only nationstate there besides Israel that can be considered a democracy. In fact, Kerry was one of the leading critics of that effort. He is now officially against nation building before he is now in favor of it.
The other fact that has become evident with the ouster of despots in that part of the world is that the leaders have somehow managed to squirrel away some rainy day money during their time in office. From accounts of the amount of money involved, it looks like there’s enough to sustain these guys for about 200 years of rain. Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, 5 billion. Egyptian Hosni Mubarek, rumored to be up to 70 billion. This guy Gaddaffi, some large amount, yet to be counted, but rumored to be in the mid ‘B”s. Assuming that this money wasn’t made from the hourly rate of being in the state leader business, perhaps it would be wise to re-funnel that money back into the respective states! Even Bernie Madoff gave back his ill-gotten loot.
Finally, it may only seem illogical to the rest of the rational world that the middle east, the greatest source of natural resource wealth in the world today, should be the recipient of financial aid from a nation that is essentially running on financial fumes. This however is logical when all your life, you’ve only dealt with other people’s money. In the case of Kerry, maybe he thinks that if you put a bit of ketchup on it, people will swallow anything no matter how distasteful.